Dream of Archeology

In the sun, on the desert hardpan, we set our brushes twitching
to uncover the chips scattered across what had once been a temple.

Nine gates opened in the wind, nine gates no longer visible.
Soon, someone found the broken tibia, the net of bones

we recognized as human and my own brush dusted away
the crumbled attar of the grave.

Dust rose up. A shape announced itself to me.
Inside the cracked bowl of a pelvis my mind sketched in a face,

a thing carried there that met the world with its wet and blood-tender
head. The sun sent down its burning sentence, even and ill-willed

as we disturbed the sleeping mother I begged would forgive
this intrusion. Though my question would be answered with decay.

Landscape Dream #7


This landscape you describe?
the one of green hills broken
by the diligence of farmers
you carry it in your head?
Or does it come to you
onlywhen you are sleeping?
Me, I have chosen to be urban
Chosen to restrict that
to the changing wind of memory
I was born there
in a bucolic place
But it is a fantasy of those
for whom the rural is a destination
An illustration:
As a child I was taken in a boat
out onto the river
Insects buzzed
Small fish rose to the surface
then receded
The boat's motor when it cut out
made the other sounds large
We drifted toward an island
separated from the banks by a channel
Drifted in the shade provided
by a canopy of trees
But soon we noticed them
cutting their S's in the brown water
slipping their dry lengths
over green branches Black
and airless they took things from us
took the small breaths
from our tightening chests
But it was more than that
Their eyes held no light
Absorbed nothing
The snakes hanging from the canopy
dropping
into the water around us
divided the world in half
The vision you have
in your head
is far superior than the actual place
which is not capable of giving you
what you always wanted
because married to the actual place
is the perpetual need for bravery
while memory's dark water is troubled
by a limbless, muscular body
that comes to you
even in your dreams


Invention

Ghost, I keep you tethered
in the shadow of my heart, tied to the tree of my ambition.

I have searched theaters of the flesh
for your imagined face, and found you

among the boy whores working the carpeted hallways
of the cinema, or at the beach in late summer

tanned thighs slipping from a sarong, urging me to compare you
to the heraldic figures.

You, my sweet invented one, I have loved you
more cleanly and with greater cruelty

than any actual suitor, to whom
I offered questions,

fed breakfast, or drove home in my car.
I wander the empty house (memory).

You appear to me stock-still
in the snow-covered corn, guarding

what I have inflicted upon you.
I beg your forgiveness. I who invented you,

I brought you here to illustrate
my own sense of having once been shattered,

then destroyed you to show the world
I intended to be whole.